Oh the joy of going to sleep these days – I never know what new material for this blog I am subconsciously going to come up with by the next morning… :-))))))
Last night, for example, I dreamt that my parents packed me off to Eton to repeat the education I so badly fucked up first time round. It might sound odd that someone whose lowest ever exam grade was an A (only though sheer hard slog I should add, not natural intelligence!!), who was appointed Scholar of the College at King’s (thereby giving me the right to have a duel on King’s College Bridge and graze my horse on university land), who even somehow managed to pull off a First at Cambridge (albeit a sympathy one of just 0.65% above the percentile) would doubt the value of their academic career, but the truth is that six odd years on since graduation and I am still plagued by my naïve folly as a starry-eyed teenager in having chosen to study the humanities rather than something more directly career-orientated instead. While on paper the grades might look impressive, in practice eight years of study between GCSE and graduation have pretty much left me with not much more than an intricate (if, professionally speaking, fairly redundant) knowledge of the European dictators, a smattering of German, and even dodgier French – it’s not like I know anything of any subjects even remotely practical like, oh I don’t know, say Law, Economics, IT, Engineering, Design, Maths, Medicine etc etc. Admittedly this educational deficiency hasn’t prevented me from rising (marginally) up the corporate ranks at home and abroad since graduation, though in truth this is largely down to my innate (oh ok then, utterly anal retentive) organizational abilities, articulacy, and a healthy dose of common sense as much as anything – am still waiting for someone to point out that I don’t actually really know anything…
Anyway, the irony of the dream in this case is that in real life I did actually attend Eton for a time, at a summer school aimed to groom promising students for Oxbridge applications / interviews. I like to think that I got to sleep in Prince William’s (then still gorgeous and also in attendance during term time) own room, but in reality I probably just got to bed down on some ancient mattress imbued with centuries’ worth of schoolboy wank / squishy remnants of public school bum-rape. Unlike in real life though, this time in the dream I was no longer dazzled by all the gilded spires, ancient archways and hallowed halls characteristic of such “pomp and circumstance” elite historical institutions, but basically just said “fuck this” and went off to do a Masters in something actually useful in a (perhaps less aesthetically pleasing but infinitely more beneficial in the long-run) vocational establishment instead.
On the opposite end of the social / geographical spectrum, the same night I also dreamt that I was holed up in some bog-standard northern comprehensive with Sophie from ‘Coronation Street’, under siege by an enraged Ryan, who was trying to burn down the school in revenge for Sophie having caused the break-up between him and that other blonde non-lesbian one. A dream that lends itself less to obvious interpretation perhaps, but then again given the predominance of moronic arsonist drones roaming round Oop North, maybe this was just a reflection of modern-day Broken British reality – that or a sign of my own personal overexposure to the soaps / the online Daily Mail I guess… :-))))))
Last night, for example, I dreamt that my parents packed me off to Eton to repeat the education I so badly fucked up first time round. It might sound odd that someone whose lowest ever exam grade was an A (only though sheer hard slog I should add, not natural intelligence!!), who was appointed Scholar of the College at King’s (thereby giving me the right to have a duel on King’s College Bridge and graze my horse on university land), who even somehow managed to pull off a First at Cambridge (albeit a sympathy one of just 0.65% above the percentile) would doubt the value of their academic career, but the truth is that six odd years on since graduation and I am still plagued by my naïve folly as a starry-eyed teenager in having chosen to study the humanities rather than something more directly career-orientated instead. While on paper the grades might look impressive, in practice eight years of study between GCSE and graduation have pretty much left me with not much more than an intricate (if, professionally speaking, fairly redundant) knowledge of the European dictators, a smattering of German, and even dodgier French – it’s not like I know anything of any subjects even remotely practical like, oh I don’t know, say Law, Economics, IT, Engineering, Design, Maths, Medicine etc etc. Admittedly this educational deficiency hasn’t prevented me from rising (marginally) up the corporate ranks at home and abroad since graduation, though in truth this is largely down to my innate (oh ok then, utterly anal retentive) organizational abilities, articulacy, and a healthy dose of common sense as much as anything – am still waiting for someone to point out that I don’t actually really know anything…
Anyway, the irony of the dream in this case is that in real life I did actually attend Eton for a time, at a summer school aimed to groom promising students for Oxbridge applications / interviews. I like to think that I got to sleep in Prince William’s (then still gorgeous and also in attendance during term time) own room, but in reality I probably just got to bed down on some ancient mattress imbued with centuries’ worth of schoolboy wank / squishy remnants of public school bum-rape. Unlike in real life though, this time in the dream I was no longer dazzled by all the gilded spires, ancient archways and hallowed halls characteristic of such “pomp and circumstance” elite historical institutions, but basically just said “fuck this” and went off to do a Masters in something actually useful in a (perhaps less aesthetically pleasing but infinitely more beneficial in the long-run) vocational establishment instead.
On the opposite end of the social / geographical spectrum, the same night I also dreamt that I was holed up in some bog-standard northern comprehensive with Sophie from ‘Coronation Street’, under siege by an enraged Ryan, who was trying to burn down the school in revenge for Sophie having caused the break-up between him and that other blonde non-lesbian one. A dream that lends itself less to obvious interpretation perhaps, but then again given the predominance of moronic arsonist drones roaming round Oop North, maybe this was just a reflection of modern-day Broken British reality – that or a sign of my own personal overexposure to the soaps / the online Daily Mail I guess… :-))))))
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment